Michael Cholbi

On its face, to disenfranchise another’s grief is to treat them unjustly — but how is this injustice best conceptualised? Here I situate this injustice within the claim that grief should be acknowledged as a human right. Traditionally, human rights have largely been understood in terms of protections related to the civil, political, legal, or economic spheres. Recently however, several human rights theorists (Brownlee etc.) have proposed that human rights should also reflect our fundamental interests in establishing and sustaining worthwhile interpersonal relationships. I argue that the human right to grief is among these ‘social human rights’ because grieving is a manifestation of a number of valued capabilities, including our abilities to love and be loved, to be attached to things and people outside ourselves, and to reflect upon and cultivate our understandings of what is meaningful in our lives, especially in response to transitions in the interpersonal relations that form the basis of our practical identities.

Grief is typically an epistemically opaque experience, such that the character of any given grief episode cannot be predicted in advance. We might wish otherwise, on the grounds that were grief not epistemically opaque, we could bring to bear extant knowledge about grief to mitigate or eliminate the suffering associated with it. Surprisingly, we should be glad that grief is epistemically opaque. For were it not, the devotion that lends much of our central personal relationships their importance would be undermined.

Many people are evidently worried about the prospect of ‘dying alone.’ But as Shelly Kagan has argued, there does not appear to be any understanding of ‘dying alone’ that would vindicate such worries: Either we do not generally die alone or our dying alone is no particular harm to us. I propose that the commonly expressed worries about ‘dying alone’ are better captured as a worry about dying lonely. Drawing on Roberts & Krueger (2020), I suggesting that dying lonely consists in dying without opportunities to realise oneself in collaboration with others, and in particular, lacking the opportunity to play the ‘dying role’ in concert with others. On this understanding Tolstoy’s Ivan ilych dies lonely, whereas Socrates did not. This understanding of dying lonely also illuminates one aspect of what might be troubling about dying with dementia. The deteriorations in capabilities characteristic of dementia likely mean that many with dementia (unknowingly) die lonely. Surprisingly though, we do not have reason to fear dying lonely whilst demented.

Euthanasia of companion animals is far less ethically controversial than human euthanasia. However, modeling the ethics of euthanizing companion animals on the ethics of euthanizing human beings is implausible. Companion animal euthanasia is better categorized as a form of potentially justifiable killing, resting on our duties to protect or promote animal wellbeing. The comparative account of the value of death provides the best account of when prematurely ending a companion animal’s life through medical means is morally justified, namely, when a companion animal’s dying would be neither a benefit nor a harm to it. Indeed, knowingly failing to euthanize a companion animal at or near that optimal time fails to respect such an animal and can treat it merely as a means (though not in the usual Kantian sense). The chapter concludes by reflecting on why companion animal guardians are specifically permitted to choose to euthanize companion animals.

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) has gained worldwide visibility as a grassroots social justice movement distinguished by a decentralized, nonhierarchical mode of organization. M4BL rose to prominence in part thanks to its protests against police brutality and misconduct directed at Black Americans. However, its animating concerns are far broader, calling for a wide range of economic, political, legal, and cultural measures to address what it terms a “war against Black people,” as well as the “shared struggle with all oppressed people.” Despite the significance of the social, political, and economic goals of M4BL, as well as the innovative organizational leadership strategies it employs, M4BL has received little sustained philosophical attention. _The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives_ brings philosophical analysis to bear on the aims, strategies, policy positions, and intellectual-historical context of M4BL. The volume broaches a wide range of pressing issues in the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, philosophy of gender, and the philosophy of punishment. Chapters address the following themes: “Black Lives Matter” as a political speech act, M4BL’s conception of the value of Black lives, the gender dynamics of the Movement, the relation of M4BL to other Black liberation movements and transitional justice movements, the Movement’s new forms of leadership and organization, and the impact of racism on the normative assessment of the criminal justice system.

A significant body of research suggests that self-control and willpower are resources that become depleted as they are exercised. Having to exert self-control and willpower draws down a person’s reservoir of these resources and makes subsequent such exercises more difficult. This ego depletion renders individuals more susceptible to manipulation by exerting nonrational influences on individual choice and conduct. In particular, ego depletion results in later choices being less governable by a person’s powers of self-control and willpower than earlier choices. This chapter draws out three implications of this phenomenon: (1) manipulation can exploit ego depletion through the fashioning of social environments that tax willpower or self-control; (2) ego depletion undermines the Platonic-Aristotelian picture of character and strength of will; and (3) ego depletion needs to be a more central focus of theorists of justice, since it appears to be a significant contributor to poverty and other persistent injustices.

Individuals are owed equal respect. But on the basis of what property of individuals are they owed such respect? A popular Kantian answer—rational agency—appears less plausible in light of the growing psychological evidence that human choice is subject to a wide array of biases (framing, laziness, etc.); human beings are neither equal in rational agency nor especially robust rational agents. Defenders of this Kantian answer thus need a non-ideal theory of equal respect for rational agency, one that takes seriously our characteristic deficiencies of practical rationality without junking the niotion that rational agency entitles us to equal respect. This chapter defends an understanding of respect for rational agency wherein the object of such respect is individuals’ aspiration to rationally govern their lives. This understanding of respect for rational agency retains the core notion of respect as a kind of deference, directs respect at persons, has suitably egalitarian implications, and does not require us to deny the aforementioned psychological evidence regarding the infirmities of human rationality.

_Suicide_ was selected as a Choice _Outstanding Academic Title_ for 2012! _Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions_ is a provocative and comprehensive investigation of the main philosophical issues surrounding suicide. Readers will encounter seminal arguments concerning the nature of suicide and its moral permissibility, the duty to die, the rationality of suicide, and the ethics of suicide intervention. Intended both for students and for seasoned scholars, this book sheds much-needed philosophical light on one of the most puzzling and enigmatic human behaviors.

Paternalistic justifications of suicide prevention hold that, all else equal, it is morally justifiable to seek to prevent a person with suicidal thoughts, ideation, or plans from engaging in suicide when and because their hastening their own death would thereby harm themselves (by, for example, preventing themselves from having a longer and better life overall), despite their not consenting to the prevention in question. On its face, the fact that suicidal persons often appear ambivalent about ending their lives seems to speak in favor of paternalistic suicide prevention. For in preventing the death via suicide of someone whose behavior suggests ambivalence on their part, third parties thereby act to prevent them from ending their lives when suicidal persons have an unsettled will regarding whether they stand to benefit from hastening their own deaths. It is seemingly unobjectionable to prevent someone from ending their lives if they themselves are not rationally convinced that they ought to end their lives, for if a person ambivalent about hastening their deaths ends their life due to suicide, they do so without their own full rational consent. In a ‘soft’ paternalist spirit then, preventing an ambivalent person from ending their lives seems to accord with their own considered rational judgment rather than acting in opposition to it. The objective of this chapter is to critically scrutinize this reasoning. My conclusion is that ambivalence’s role in suicide prevention is more equivocal than is suggested by this reasoning.

Suicide prevention is often justified by appeal to paternalism, i.e., to the putative fact that individuals typically engage in suicide based on the mistaken belief that a premature death would be in their interests. The Paternalistic Presumption holds that paternalistic considerations are ordinarily sufficient to establish a burden of proof in favor of suicide prevention efforts. This chapter aims to problematize the Paternalistic Presumption: Even when paternalism is most morally justified in principle, paternalism is a less compelling justification for suicide prevention than it initially appears. Our abilities to identify who is likely to engage in suicide and to exercise impartial judgment regarding those individuals’ interests is highly limited. In addition, there is good reason to suspect that paternalistic (i.e., non-consensual) methods of suicide prevention are generally less effective than consensual methods. Finally, some prevention methods should be opposed on paternalistic grounds because they reduce individuals’ lifetime well-being. Hence, even philosophical enthusiasts for paternalism should be skeptical about paternalistic justifications of suicide prevention.

We often feel duty-bound to grieve our loved ones after their deaths. But how can we owe grief (or anything) to those who are no longer alive? We propose that the duty to grieve the deceased is part of a wider duty found in mutually loving relationships, which we call a duty of practical fidelity. The duty of practical fidelity commands us to ‘factor’ our loved ones into our practical identities, while encouraging them to do the same. Fulfillment of the duty requires that we attend to radical changes in their identities – and few changes are more radical than death. We grieve in order to adapt our practical identities to the death of a loved one. Failure to do so wrongs the deceased.

Grievers attach great importance to opportunities to build or sustain memories of the deceased and their lives with the deceased. But in engaging with such memories, grievers do not aim at creating the largest possible storehouse of retrievable memories. Rather, they undertake a process of memory building, in which they attend to such memories to redetermine their significance in light of the loss. But what guides this seemingly goal-driven endeavor? Here we argue that such memory building is eudaimonically valuable because and to the extent it enables bereaved individuals to resituate the deceased in their practical identity on the new terms necessitated by the other’s death. Memory building in grief involves sifting through emotionally salient memories in order to build a stable store of memories that underwrites the role that the deceased will play in the bereaved individual’s life going forward. We close by considering the degree to which the memories at play in bereavement-based memory building must be accurate.

Ethical debates about assisted dying typically assume that only medical professionals should be able to provide patients with assisted dying. This assumption partially rests on the unstated principle that assisted dying providers may not be motivated by pecuniary considerations. Here I outline and defend a mixed provider model of assisted dying provision that contests this principle. Under this model, medically competent non-physician professionals could receive fees for providing assisted dying under the same terms and conditions as physicians can in those jurisdictions where medically assisted dying is lawful. The mixed provider model blunts objections to assisted dying rooted in supposed clashes with medical values. In addition to generating a market likely to expand access to assisted dying, the mixed provider model would not create markets that are unjust because they are “noxious” in Satz’ sense or because they raise “semiotic” concerns about the value of human life.

This book provides novel perspectives on ethical justifiability of assisted dying in the revised edition of New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. Going significantly beyond traditional debates about the value of human life, the ethical significance of individual autonomy, the compatibility of assisted dying with the ethical obligations of medical professionals, and questions surrounding intention and causation, this book promises to shift the terrain of the ethical debates about assisted dying. The novel themes discussed in the revised edition include the role of markets, disability, gender, artificial intelligence, medical futility, race, and transhumanism. Ideal for advanced courses in bioethics and healthcare ethics, the book illustrates how social and technological developments will shape debates about assisted dying in the years to come.

Philosophers have long debated whether fear of death is rational. This claim is difficult to vindicate: Either death is harmless to us, or if it can harm us, its harms are comparative and so do not merit fear. But much of what we classify as 'fear of death' is more likely to be anxiety about death, rooted less in uncertainty regarding whether death will occur but in uncertainty about whether death must prove bad for us. This anxiety in turns tracks a form of self-directed grief, resting on an awareness that death threatens our practical identities.

Medicalization occurs when a phenomenon comes to be subject to medical study, diagnosis, treatment, or prevention. Whether a phenomenon ought to be medicalized should be decided on a case-by-case basis. Recent moves to remove “bereavement exclusions” from psychiatric diagnostic manuals and to introduce grief-specific medical disorders have elicited criticisms from skeptics about grief’s medicalization, but these criticisms can largely be blunted. This article first clarifies the nature of disputes about medicalization, highlighting how these disputes do not concern whether a condition such as grief is clinically significant or whether it can generate illness, but whether the condition itself is rightfully categorized as potentially pathological. It then offers a stronger, philosophically grounded case against the medicalization of grief, resting on how medicalizing grief is likely to detrimentally alter the moral and political meanings attached to grief. Specifically, medicalizing grief will “normativize” a medical vocabulary for evaluating grief that may impede authentic engagement with grief, validate a suspect “time slice” model of human well-being that overlooks how grief can benefit a person’s life as a whole, and impede desirable sympathy or solidarity with grieving persons.

Because an increasing number of patients have medical conditions that render them incompetent at making their own medical choices, more and more medical choices are now made by surrogates, often patient family members. However, many studies indicate that surrogates often do not discharge their responsibilities adequately, and in particular, do not choose in accordance with what those patients would have chosen for themselves, especially when it comes to end-of-life medical choices. This chapter argues that a significant part of the explanation of such surrogate failure is that family surrogates are likely to undergo anticipatory grief when making end-of-life decisions. After clarifying both the emotional structure and object of grief, I propose that the pending death of a loved one induces an emotional conflict in surrogates between the care demanded by their responsibility as surrogates and the attachment surrogates feel toward their dying loved one, an attachment surrogates "resolve" in the direction of attachment rather than care. This hypothesis helps to explain both surrogates' general inability to exercise "substituted judgment" on behalf of their loved ones and a wide swath of the particular data regarding this inability (e.g., that surrogates more often err by choosing overtreatment). I conclude by considering possible clinical and philosophical responses to this hypothesis.

Discussions of the nature or possibility of moral expertise have largely proceeded in atheoretical terms, with little attention paid to whether moral expertise depends on theoretical knowledge of morality. Here I argue that moral expertise is more theory-dependent than is commonly recognized: Moral expertise consists, at least in part, in knowledge of the correct or best moral theory, and second, that knowledge of moral theory is essential to moral experts dispensing expert counsel to non-experts. Moral experts would not be moral experts absent knowledge of moral theory, nor could they play the testimonial role we would expect them to play in moral inquiry and deliberation absent such knowledge.

Ethical debates about assisted dying typically assume that only medical professionals should be able to provide patients with assisted dying. This assumption partially rests on the unstated principle that assisted dying providers may not be motivated by pecuniary considerations. Here I outline and defend a mixed provider model of assisted dying provision that contests this principle. Under this model, medically competent non-physician professionals could receive fees for providing assisted dying under the same terms and conditions as physicians can in those juris- dictions where medically assisted dying is lawful. The mixed provider model blunts objections to assisted dying rooted in supposed clashes with medical values. In addition to generating a market likely to expand access to assisted dying, the mixed provider model would not create markets that are unjust because they are “noxious” in Satz’ sense or because they raise “semiotic” concerns about the value of human life.

Critics have raised many moral and legal concerns about posthumous digital avatars. Here my focus instead falls on whether they are likely to enable the bonds with the dead that users apparently yearn for. I conclude that though posthumous avatars can have short-term therapeutic benefits in replicating “habits of intimacy” with the dead, users’ expectations for sustaining long-term bonds with the deceased via posthumous avatars are unlikely to be fulfilled. Posthumous avatars are unlikely to foster the construction of valued memories of the deceased and could in fact impede this process. Furthermore, bonds that develop with posthumous avatars are likely to disappoint users’ expectations for relationships that echo relationships among the living in being temporally dynamic, open-ended, authentic, and mutually shaping. Simply put, users will struggle to sustain living relationships with dead people. Posthumous avatars are therefore likely to prove ill-suited to continue the bonds that the living have with the dead in either of these two forms, especially if a ‘digital afterlife industry’ emerges to commercialize these.

Both proponents and opponents of capital punishment largely agree that death is the most severe punishment that societies should consider imposing on offenders. This chapter considers how (if at all) this ‘Ultimate Thesis’ can be vindicated. Appeals to the irrevocability of death, the badness of being executed, the badness of death, or the harsh condemnation societies express by sentencing offenders to death do not succeed in vindicating this Thesis, and in particular, fail to show that capital punishment is more severe than the most likely alternative punishment offenders would suffer, namely, lifelong incarceration. The most plausible vindication of the Ultimate Thesis instead resides in how being condemned to death alters a person’s psychological relation to death. Our ordinary tendencies toward “death denial” diminish the terror that our awareness of death can otherwise induce in us, thereby enabling us to pursue worthwhile lives despite knowing of death’s inevitability. But condemned individuals are continually compelled to confront both the reality and specific circumstances of their own deaths and so do not enjoy the protective psychic shield that death denial provides us. This ‘relational’ rationale does not obviously succeed in proving the Ultimate Thesis, but if the Thesis is true, this rationale is essential to its justification.

Knowledge and respect exhibit a puzzling self-other asymmetry: Self-respect generates an imperative to know oneself, but as the objectionability of paternalism and privacy violations illustrate, respect for others can require that we avoid acquiring, or making use of, knowledge we have about them. This article elaborates this asymmetry and offers a solution to it, rooted in the distinctive importance that self-knowledge has for self-respecting rational agents: Self-respecting agents have reasons to have others defer to their ‘surfaces’ or self-presentations in order to inhibit making themselves vulnerable to others in ways that undermine their self-respect by subordinating their wills to the wills of others, as well as to ensure that self-knowledge can play its desired role in the lives of self-respecting agents.